Graham Jaehnig/Daily Mining Gazette Hancock Superintendent Steve Patchin discussed the need for standardized testing this year to help the state of Michigan assess how much information students are getting during an unprecedented year of edutation.

HANCOCK — While the U.S. Department of Education has stated standardized testing, in some form, will occur this spring, but late last month suggested that states can submit requests for waivers from accountability and school identification requirements included in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Those include everything from public data on school test scores, to teacher evaluations.

Amid increasing concerns over standardized testing in a school year that has been anything but standard, Superintendent Steve Patchin says the tests this year have definite pros and cons, both of which he understands.

While the testing can take up an entire week, which schools can hardly afford this spring, the tests will provide badly needed hard data moving forward, he said.

“Everybody’s looking at one test,” said Patchin, “and thinking that one test is going to tell you everything that they should be learning and not learning; and it’s going to judge their progress; and it’s going to tell you about the teachers; and it’s going to tell you about the school.”

There is no way one test can do all that, he cautioned. The tests, he said, were originally just about core content — math, science — what is best process by which students can memorize and repeat. But they have come to look for more and more data — some of which just cannot be determined on a multiple choice scantron test.

The biggest knock against standardized testing, Patchin said, is that it is just one test, and there are certain strengths and weaknesses, such as a student’s ability to control emotions, simply cannot be quantified on a test. Intelligence, and not what — but — how a student learns is impossible to determine from a test. Yet, there are critical pieces data that the Michigan Department of Education Superintendent Michael Rice needs, particularly now. During the last quarter of the 2020 school year, schools were given a waiver from standardized testing and, said Patchin, another waiver may not be good for anyone.

While many are arguing against the upcoming testing, asking if the students have not been through enough over the past year already, Patchin said Rice needs the test results to establish a benchmark by which he can determine where the students actually are in their educational progress. The test results, across the state, are going to be “all over the board,” he said, because schools have had to do things drastically different from one another since March 2020.

“Up here, we’ve been face-face for a lot longer than anyone else,” said Patchin, “I think Ann Arbor is just dipping their toes in the water to go back face-face-to-face, while Kalamazoo might not even do it this year.”

With data, however, if schools pass a period of time during which they do not test and gather data, going backward in time is impossible, he said.

“We’ve just been through a cataclysmic event, and we have no idea what the results (of the event) are,” Patchin said, “and we have to be able to gather that data, so at least we can look at it and say: ‘Okay, these schools that were all face-to-face this time, or these schools that were all virtual, or these schools that were mixed, where do these kids end up at?’ and use (the data) to analyze it.”

Patchin said he understands why so many are against the testing this spring, but at the same time, the data needs to be collected now, because it will be useful later on.

In discussing the testing with his principals, Patching said they pointed out that the negative side of the testing is its required week of time. If there was a time an extra week of instruction was needed for the students, now is that time, he said.